AMD releases Radeon ProRender 2.4 for Blender
Alex Treviño’s Junk Shop scene for Blender 2.81, re-rendered by AMD using Radeon ProRender for Blender. Version 2.4 of the plugin adds a preview of AMD’s next-gen render mode, supporting out-of-core geometry.
AMD has released Radeon ProRender 2.4 for Blender, the latest update to the Blender edition of its free, physically accurate GPU renderer.
The release adds support for the upcoming Blender 2.83, the option to import and render OpenVDB volumes, plus a preview of AMD’s next-gen render mode, with support for out-of-core geometry.
New ‘next gen’ renderer supports out-of-core geometry and textures
The biggest new feature in Radeon ProRender 2.4 for Blender is AMD’s “next generation” renderer – version 2.0 of the ProRender SDK – introduced here as an experimental mode on Windows only.
It supports out-of-core textures and geometry, which should mean that users can render scenes too large to fit into their GPU’s graphics memory without the performance hit that traditionally results.
AMD says that non-out-of-core performance and memory usage should also be better, particularly for complex scenes, and when rendering with multiple GPUs or with both CPU and GPU.
Other changes: import and render OpenVDB volumes, bake nodes to textures
As with previous updates, the release also adds support for the latest version of Blender: in this case, Blender 2.83, originally due to ship this week, but now in beta until the start of June.
In particular, that means support for rendering OpenVDB files created in other DCC applications and imported via Blender 2.83’s new Volume Object.
Other changes include the option to bake parts of Blender’s node graph to textures, making it possible to use nodes that the renderer does not support natively, like Blender’s noise texture nodes.
Users can either select nodes within the graph manually, or just choose to Bake All Unknown Nodes.
There are also a number of performance improvements and better support for individual Blender shader nodes, including support for five more of the Mix node‘s blend modes. Find a full list via the link below.
Availability and system requirements
Radeon ProRender 2.4 for Blender is compatible with Blender 2.80+ on Windows 10, Ubuntu 16.04.3 and 18.04.0 Linux, and macOS 10.13.3+ and macOS 10.14. It’s a free download.
Read a full list of new features in Radeon ProRender 2.4 for Blender in the online release notes